How do I disable registration temporarily?

I have a BBPress forum that is not being used, but might see some use eventually. I use it to experiment with BBPress, too. When Forums gather cobwebs, they can attract Spammers. I started getting a steady stream of similar-looking registration attempts, probably from a single group of Spammers. I put up a temporary index.html page, basically saying Forum Closed to discourage Spammers, and hid the index.php in a Backup folder. This assures nobody will come in the front door, but did not stop the spammers, who apparently are coming in directly to the registration area. The new users are being automatically flagged as bozos by BBPress, but I am having to delete them manually as they come in.

I would like to disable registration completely for a while to encourage them to go away. What if I moved register.php into my Backup folder? Would that do the job?

You should look in your logs though to see where they are coming in. Sometimes they go right to bb-login.php as well. Anything related to login really. They’re not sitting there browsing the forum and clicking the [login] button.

You can also install _ck_’s Human Test plugin to prevent most of the registrations:

Thanks, Chris. Since I am getting registration emails to moderate, I am guessing register.php is the more likely route, but I am not a coder, and really appreciate your suggestions. Also, I just checked, and I was already running the Human Test plugin.

Hey biodrama – you may want to check that you have the latest version of Human Test!. Some spammers found a workaround to an older version, but an updated version has proved more resilient… once I dl’d the latest version, the spammers disappeared!

I was running HumanTest 0.9.0, which is the latest version so far as I can tell. The spammers must have been getting in a back door. Chris mentioned I should look in my logs to see where they were getting in, but I don’t know how to do this. The bogus registration emails stopped cold when I disabled register.php.